Crossing Borders

In a region used to high-stakes political and military campaigns, Hizbullah's border raid on Israel last week must count as one of the most risky moves in years.

Though some may not have expected the sheer ferocity of the Israeli response - with more than 200 Lebanese dead, this is already the most deadly conflict between Israel and Lebanon in two decades - there can have been few doubts that Israel would hit back hard.

So why did Hizbullah launch the raid? Its standing in the Muslim world as a whole has certainly increased, despite criticisms from western-allied Arab governments of "adventurism". But in Lebanon itself, where the movement holds two cabinet posts and was enjoying growing influence across the political spectrum, its future position is harder to read.

Many Christians and Sunni Muslims have been torn between condemning the Israeli attacks and attacking Hizbullah for bringing them on. Even amongst Shia Muslims, who have always been the bedrock of Hizbullah's support, the savagery of the Israeli bombings has prompted criticisms of the group that is seen as having provoked them.

The simplest explanation for last week's attack would be that Hizbullah seized the opportunity of the Gaza hostage crisis as a chance to gain concessions from Israel. One of the greatest coups of its leader Hassan Nasrallah was a 2004 prisoner swap in which 400 Lebanese were released in exchange for a kidnapped Israeli businessman. After last week's raid, Nasrallah similarly called for Israel to release Lebanese prisoners in exchange for the two Israeli soldiers captured in the skirmish.

But the language of his statements since Israel's military campaign began seems to push the issue further than that. In a recorded message last week on the second day of Israeli attacks on Beirut, he vowed to bring "open war ... to [the Israeli city of] Haifa and beyond Haifa".

Several analysts have pointed to the sophistication of Hizbullah's military response as evidence that this conflict was planned months in advance, and both Iran and Syria have been named as possible puppet-masters in the conflict.

Rami Khouri, a Jordanian political analyst and editor-at-large of Beirut's Daily Star newspaper, points to the low death toll of Hizbullah members as evidence that the group expected and planned for the attacks. "All these buildings blown up [by the Israelis] were empty buildings," he says.

He sees Hizbullah's political aims as being bound up with the wider pan-Arab stance against Israel. "Nasrallah has been very open about Hizbullah's aims for many years: they want to get the prisoners held in Israel free; they want to stop the Israeli aggression; they want to stop the deterioration that's been going on for the past 30 or 40 years.

"One of the things they're fighting for is Arab honour and dignity. They succeeded in driving the Israelis out of southern Lebanon and they see themselves as part of a battle that's ongoing."

Hizbullah's military action over the past week - raining missiles on major towns deep inside northern Israel and crippling an Israeli ship off the Lebanese coast - has certainly delivered a bloody nose to an Israeli army that all parties in the Middle East are used to thinking of as almost invincible.

Experts estimate that Hizbullah is the third most powerful military force in the region, after Israel and Iran, and, while coalitions of Arab nations were comprehensively defeated by Israel in the three Arab-Israeli wars of 1948-49, 1967 and 1973, Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 was widely regarded as a unique Arab military victory for Hizbullah.

Such victories speak to a sense of Arab pride that is wounded at every turn by the diplomatic and military predominance of Israel, by the corruption and craven behaviour of many Arab governments, and by the perceived Islamophobia of Washington's "war on terror".

Nasrallah's public statements and oft-reproduced image appear to be aimed at this sense of Arab pride. They have cast him in the mould of a long line of Arab and Muslim resistance leaders marked out by their staunch opposition to western interference - a genealogy that encompasses figures as diverse as Egypt's independence leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, Yasser Arafat, Syria's late president Hafez al-Assad, Iran's revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini and Osama Bin Laden.

The danger of this tactic is that, for 40 years, the same rhetoric has always led to Arab and Muslim leaders being wrongfooted in the Middle East by an Israeli government that is not only better armed, but also more skilled at the arts of diplomacy and blessed with a close relationship with Washington.

In the short and medium terms there can be no solution to the situation of the Middle East without American support, and the political wind in the US now hugely favours the Israelis. Washington refuses to "bind Israel's hands" by calling for a ceasefire in the current conflict, and a Democrat opposition determined to match the government's hawkishness on the issue is highly unlikely to demand anything different.

Nasrallah's positioning also throws the Lebanese government into jeopardy, in a country still recovering from 15 years of bitter ethnic conflict and more than two decades of foreign control.

Chibli Mallat, a Beirut lawyer and presidential candidate, says that the actions of the past week have burned bridges that Hizbullah had been tentatively building with Lebanon's Christian community, who make up two-fifths of the population.

"My sense is that most of the population of this country do not accept the adventurist dimension of [Hizbullah's] action last week. We have not been consulted and we are in an open war that we do not want to be part of.

"Hizbullah are part of the Lebanese fabric and we want to protect them from [Israeli assassination attempts] but we are not obliged to follow them into this war."

The deeper political calculation in Hizbullah's public relations drive may involve factors beyond Lebanon, in an attempt to galvanise the more radical strands of Arab politics at a time when Washington is pushing select Arab governments to open up more to democracy.

Millions of Arabs and Muslims who see their governments as timid tools of western policy remain suspicious of Islamist parties, who wish to make Islam the basis of political life. But Hizbullah, which is itself an Islamist group, knows from its own history that the best way to improve the electoral fortunes of such parties is to mark the Islamists out as the only legitimate voices of nationalism and independence. Recent elections in Kuwait, Iran and the Palestinian territories all saw strong gains for Islamists who fought on anti-corruption platforms - and "corruption" is often seen as at least in part a cipher for western influence.

In this battle between a pure nationalist Islam and a cowardly westernised secularism, there is little doubt which side Hassan Nasrallah - a pious fighter who gave up his own son to the cause and lives with his family in a modest house in south Beirut - represents.